The present advancements relate to Video Call Centers and associated methodology of controlling Interactive Voice and Video Responses. Video calls are increasingly becoming the preferred form of remote real-time communication. The proliferation of video-enabled devices and the rapid growth in available bandwidth are making conversational video increasingly available to businesses and consumers alike.
The rise of conversational video creates new demands for businesses and telecom service providers. As the number of video-equipped consumers increase, the demand for video-enabled services also increases. Moreover, video calls are no longer limited to advanced endpoints specifically adapted for video conferencing. Video calls can also be facilitated from cell phones and PC's. As real-time communication is emerging from audio only towards multimedia communication, there is an increasing need for adapting common services, optimized for audio calls only, to services where the benefits of real-time video are also used. Some of the most developed services in this context are call centers.
A call center is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by phone. A call center is usually operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls, for example, for telemarketing, clientele, and debt collection are also made.
A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. The call center can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI); this also includes linking with e-mail, databases and web-based services.
Most major businesses use call centers to interact with their customers. Business applications for call centers are virtually unlimited in the types of transactions that they can accommodate. Call centers can support, for example, sales, including order entry, order inquiry, and reservations; financial services, including funds transfer, credit card verification, and stock transactions; information services, including event schedules, referral services, transportation schedules, and yellow pages; and customer services, including technical support, repair dispatch, and claims handling. Examples of businesses that use call centers include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions, such as help desks and sales support, through call centers.
Call centers include some sort of switching network, ranging from dedicated circuit switches to using IP multimedia technologies, such as voice and video over IP. The call center can be modeled as a number of queues. The callers can join a queue based on, for example, a menu choice, or from information known about the caller, such as the geographical location derived from the caller's country code, or the phone number called. The agents can serve queues based on various techniques known as Automatic Call Distribution or Skill-based routing, where, for example, the agent's knowledge of languages is taken into account together with other factors such as response time.
The benefits to call centers adopting video communication are relatively obvious. For example, videophone customer service allows customers to see the agent when they call for assistance. Video services that benefit users are needed to enhance the uptake rate for videophones. Offering hosted video call center services will give enterprises a way to create their own video call centers quickly and cost effectively, further fueling the demand for video calling.
IVVR (Interactive Video and Voice Response) is the extension of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) by the addition of video. IVVR adds a new multimodal dimension to the caller experience. In addition to hearing traditional IVR voice menus and announcements, a caller can see menu choices to expedite the call, and receive video presentations while waiting for an agent, during transfers, or at other appropriate places in the IVVR dialogue. This creates new service and revenue possibilities ranging from ad-subsidized free information, to paid entertainment, and more.
IVVR can be used as a video front-end to a traditional voice call center, or as part of a video call center where callers see agents and vice versa when callers are so equipped. Call centers that can't be immediately upgraded to video can still offer IVVR to video-enable the self-service portion of the call and then transfer the call to a voice agent in the legacy call center. In call centers that can upgrade to video, IVVR is the video-enabled prelude and gateway to the video agents.
The use of video and web technology in call centers is known. U.S. Pat. No. 6,404,747: Integrated audio and video agent system in an automatic call distribution environment, teaches a general solution for a video multimedia call center. U.S. Pat. No. 6,389,132: Multi-tasking, web-based call center, teaches a web-based call center. None of these patents provide a simple and flexible method to identify an agent that calls into the queue; instead they build on the assumption that the agents are called by the automatic call distributor.
Virtual worlds such as There by Makena, Alphaworld by Activeworlds and Second Life by Linden Labs are platforms increasingly used for communication. In such worlds persons are represented by an avatar, i.e. a graphical 3D representation that can be animated. The avatar can usually walk or fly. For going from one location to another in a virtual world, teleportation is commonly used, i.e. the computer controlling the world simply moves the avatar to a new location based on input from the user. The location can e.g. be given as a combination of coordinates and place names. For a business setting up a center in a virtual world there is a need to establish a call center or to integrate existing call centre functions with the presence in the virtual world.